First published online December 4, 2008
While visiting Grand Forks a couple of months ago I drove by my favorite building, Gilbert’s Depot. It’s made of stone in a region that uses mainly wood and brick. The restoration done in 1986 has held up well, creating a fine albeit different impression from the one architect Cass Gilbert created in 1891. I suspect Gilbert would not be surprised that his depot--designed to inspire a sense of permanence--has actually achieved that quality. His minimalist early period depot has faced formidable floods and, for awhile, was even a down-at-heel eyesore.
(The following was first published in the Grand Forks Herald, May 2, 1985)
Photograph courtesy of Myra Museum, Grand Forks, ND
Grand Fork’s train depot: An echo of another era
By Carol Wallwork
Burlington Northern Railroad has a white elephant on its hands: the Grand Forks Depot.
The railroad wants $55,000 for the building alone. Railroads rarely sell land, and it will cost considerably more to restore it, within reason, to its former glory.
So for now, this once finest representation in Grand Forks of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style sits empty. This dilemma reveals much that plagues building restoration.
If the building were located in Boston or even Indianapolis, it would easily be worth the asking price. But in this region it is difficult to find a tenant eager for just a 20-year lease. While BN sits on its asset, Grand Forks is unable to use one of its most notable buildings.
The depot is made of a peach-gray Kettle River stone. It is one of a handful of stone buildings not only in the city but the region. It cost a whopping $100,000 in 1891 and was designed by Cass Gilbert early in his career. Gilbert went on to become one of America’s most successful architects, his crowning achievements: the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington DC. And still, despite street diversions since it was built in the early 1890s, Gilbert's depot has a most uncommon regional building characteristic: a sense of presence on its site. This is not so much the noble intention of its architect as the sheer logistics of train tracks and their demand for space.
This building represents not only the difficulties of building restoration but also exemplifies fundamental facts about architecture: the needs of the people who built it, their values and skills, and their power to pull off the first two.
Trains are one of the most romantic and sophisticated technological forms ever created, and their accompanying architecture reflects the train culture’s rise to power and its subsequent decline and usurpation by the automobile.
In 19th-century America, the train culture ruled. Deals were made, empires won and lost, and the Soo Line, the Great Northern, the Sante Fe and many more railroads rapidly dotted cities and towns with one of the most delightful of architectural accomplishments, the train depot.
But railroad depots didn’t just spring into existence. Not until Henry Hobson Richardson, a great corpulent Boston architect, turned his skills to the lowly railroad depot in the early 1880s did the architectural world take it seriously. Up until then, depot design was ‘fit’ only for engineers to fiddle with and often looked like houses. American architects were too busy designing chateaus and palaces and Queen Anne retreats for the likes of the Vanderbilts, Astors and the Mellons.
Richardson influenced the heart of countless American cities and towns that developed around their downtowns. Richardson ranks with the company of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan as one of America’s most influential and gifted architects. He restored that all-but-forgotten practical early American habit of using indigenous materials in his structures. The amount of marble imported into America in the 19th century could probably have create a small mountain range.
Richardson spent the Civil War in Paris, studying at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, before he was made destitute by the war’s effect on his Louisiana-family’s fortunes. In France he discovered the Romanesque. After the war, he returned to Boston, where he slowly established his architectural reputation. Boston is enriched by the remaining depots and libraries designed by Richardson.
North Dakota is enriched by his influence on Gilbert, the designer of Grand Forks Great Northern depot.
Gilbert was a hotshot young architect, one of the earliest graduates of the new Massachusetts School of Architecture, in Boston. Richardson’s influence was inescapable. Gilbert apprenticed in the premier architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. Gilbert worked closest with the firm’s most talented partner, Stanley White.
Early in his career, he became affiliated with one of the most successful corporations in the country, the Great Northern Railway, which later merged with the Northern Pacific to become the Great Northern. It is to the Great Northern’s credit that it regarded its influence on the Plains as justifying an architect of Gilbert’s caliber. By the time Gilbert designed the Grand Forks Great Northern depot, Richardson was dead.
Gilbert’s Grand Forks depot exemplifies the most understated point in his career. Gilbert went on to design the more showy Fargo Northern Pacific depot; and the grandiose but finely balanced State Capitol in St. Paul, modeled after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It has the second largest unsupported dome in the world.
His most modernist achievement was the 57-story Woolworth Building in New York City. Its high-tech steel frame has the most Gothic-style facade of any skyscraper, and was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler Tower stole that distinction in 1927. The Supreme Court Building in Washington DC was his last major commission before his death, in 1934, one year before it’s completion. Built during the Great Depression it was possibly the only public building to come in UNDER budget, $93,532.03 less than the $9,740,000 allocated.
Gilbert’s been accused of retreading tired Renaissance design themes that his avant-garde contemporaries were abandoning. But critics could never find fault with his dazzling command of proportion, form and overall design. His later baroque exuberance offers a robust contrast to much 20-century architecture.
His Grand Forks depot has known sunnier times. When it was built, the first of its two stories was graced with a pent roof that jutted out to offer passengers protection from the weather. In the center, on the street side of the hexagonal hip roof, was a large, square clock tower, topped with a recessed pyramidal roof.
How the depot lost its clock tower is a matter of debate. One story has it that a bigwig Great Northern official checked the clock, which was wrong, and missed an important meeting-or train. His angry reaction led to the ‘axing’ of the tower in retribution. A railroad official’s account says the tower was removed because it was unsafe.
Gilbert’s depot created, like the Romanesque style it was modeled after, the impression of stability and permanence. It was no doubt a reassuring beginning to immigrarnt settlers starting their new life in the Red River Valley.
It reveals Richardson’s influence in its rough-faced stone and its almost minimalist but strong design.
Today, the pent roof, the chimney stack and the clock tower are gone. What remains still makes an impression. But like an old exiled Russian count working as a waiter in a two-star Parisian restaurant, the old days were definitely kinder.
(The following was first published in the Grand Forks Herald circa summer 1986)
GF architect brings depot to new life
By Kevin Bonham
…When architect William Schoen of Schoen Associates and two partners finish restoring The Depot in August, the $500,000 investment will put a new shine on a remarkable Grand Forks building.
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